What’s the hubbub about Hubble?

If you’re on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, you have probably seen ads for Hubble contact lenses promising you “high quality” contact lenses for a low price.

At first glance, they sound great. We love daily lenses, and agree that daily replacement is the safest and healthiest way to wear contacts. We like to save money, and are always looking for rebate programs and ways to help our patients maximize their insurance savings. We want contact lens wear to be convenient, and like Hubble, we mail out lenses to our patients whenever we can. We even spoke with the Hubble people to see if fitting these lenses at our office would be good for our patients and our practice.

BUT the more we learned, the more we realized that this is not as good as it sounds on the surface.

Here are a few reasons why:

OXYGEN. The material your contact lenses are made of and the thickness of the lens determine the amount of oxygen that can pass through the lens to your cornea. Your lenses might feel fine, but if your cornea doesn’t get enough oxygen, it can swell up and blur your vision, or start to develop new blood vessels which make your eyes look red and tired, and increase your risk for infections and ulcers. The measure of oxygen transmissibility through a lens is called Dk/t, and the higher the number, the healthier a lens is for your cornea. The Dk/t of Hubble contacts is 18.8. In 2017, most of the lenses we fit have a Dk/t over 100. For example, most of our staff members and many of our patients wear Dailies Total One, which have a Dk/t of 156-- that’s over 8 TIMES MORE OXYGEN reaching the cornea.

MATERIAL. Hubble contacts are made of Methafilcon A, which is a material which was popular for contact lens brands in the late 1990’s. People were wearing methafilcon lenses while watching Beverly Hills 90210 on their 27” televisions and worrying about Y2K! Would you buy an “antique” television to save money? No way! Then why would you even consider watching your modern TV with antique contacts?

VISION. Even if you’re willing to risk your corneas to low oxygen lenses and are still happily recording shows on your VHS, you still want to see… right? Hubble lenses are currently only available in a small range of prescriptions-- and don’t have any options for people who have astigmatism or wear bifocals.

Everyone loves to save money… but when it comes to your eyeballs, do you really want to accept lower quality to save a few bucks?

You know that our promise at Somerset Eye Care is to take care of our patients the same way we’d want someone to take care of us and the people we love… and we wouldn’t let the people we love wear Hubble contacts.